


My Lunch With Abed

by anemicaxolotl



Series: i can't do this all on my own [1]
Category: Community (TV)
Genre: Eating Disorders, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, M/M, Pining, Post-Episode: s02e03 The Psychology of Letting Go, Scrubs (TV) References, uh spoilers for the Scrubs episodes "My Lunch" and "My Fallen Idol"
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-22
Updated: 2020-12-22
Packaged: 2021-03-10 21:21:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,186
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28233828
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anemicaxolotl/pseuds/anemicaxolotl
Summary: “Isn’t this the episode where Dr. Cox’s pager goes off and they never get to eat that lunch?” Jeff arches an eyebrow. “Busy doctors and all that.”Abed shoots him a finger gun as he stands up and heads toward the kitchen. “Good thing you’re a community college student with no interruptions. Do you have any diet Squirt?”Or: Abed tries to bring Jeff lunch. It doesn't go well.
Relationships: Abed Nadir/Jeff Winger
Series: i can't do this all on my own [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2119737
Comments: 16
Kudos: 84





	My Lunch With Abed

**Author's Note:**

> Warning for a lot of eating disorder content here. Watching Scrubs isn't super necessary for this fic, but highly recommend watching "My Lunch" anyway if you like being sad.

Jeff isn’t expecting a knock on his door in the middle of the day on a Saturday, but he’s not exactly surprised when it comes, either. He glances through the peephole just long enough to confirm his suspicions before smiling wryly and opening the door.

“Are you familiar with the _Scrubs_ episode ‘My Lunch’?” Abed asks by way of greeting, slipping past Jeff into his apartment and heading for the living room.

“Hello to you too,” Jeff calls, knocking the door shut. “Where’ve you been lately?”

“Had some side plots. Not really relevant to the main arc,” Abed answers from the couch. He places a white paper bag on the coffee table in front of him. “Answer the question.”

Jeff makes his away over to the couch and takes a seat, eyeing Abed warily. “I’m sure I’ve seen it before,” he says, “but if this is an homage I’m supposed to understand, you’re going to need to refresh my memory on the specifics.”

“For our own purposes today you don’t need to know the whole plot. Essentially, JD has been trying to get Dr. Cox to agree to go to lunch with him. Dr. Cox refuses, naturally, but then three of his patients die of rabies due to a call he made. It’s not his fault, but he blames himself.” Abed gestures to the bag on the table in front of them. “JD brings him lunch and tries to keep his guilt from spiraling out of control.”

Jeff can feel his jaw clenching as he nods, trying to keep his voice neutral as he replies. “Right. I thought you once said my personality was about forty percent JD.”

“Just your mannerisms. And to be fair, that was season one, when I didn’t know you as well as I do now.” Abed glances at him before dropping his gaze back to the table in front of him. “In retrospect it’s much clearer that you’ve been Dr. Cox this whole time, which makes me your JD.”

Thinking of Abed as his JD, as his _anything,_ is a train of thought too dangerous to board right now. Instead, Jeff stares at the Rorschach splotch of grease pooling on the side of the bag where it rests on the coffee table, trying not to think about what it contains. Whatever it is smells good – hearty, definitely fried, and probably nothing Jeff has ever eaten in front of Abed before.

“Isn’t this the episode where Dr. Cox’s pager goes off and they never get to eat that lunch?” Jeff arches an eyebrow. “Busy doctors and all that.”

Abed shoots him a finger gun as he stands up and heads toward the kitchen. “Good thing you’re a community college student with no interruptions. Do you have any diet Squirt?”

Jeff hears Abed digging through his fridge, grabbing cans of diet Sprite (as if he’d ever stoop to buying something like _Squirt_ , or Lemon Fresca, which has been Abed’s second choice of drink as of late) before rummaging through his cabinets for napkins. When he returns, he passes Jeff a can before dropping the napkins unceremoniously on the table and throwing himself back onto the couch. He shoots another glance at Jeff like he’s waiting for him to speak.

“I didn’t unknowingly infect three people with rabies, Abed,” Jeff says slowly, watching Abed reach for the bag.

He pulls out two paper-wrapped sandwiches, placing one in front of Jeff, and paper cartons of French fries that smell absolutely heavenly. That’s where the grease is coming from; it’s pooling at the bottom of the container, seeping out at the seams. Jeff can see the salt glistening against the golden-brown edges of the fries, and he can _feel_ his mouth start to water. Stupid, fat fucking failure.

“You’re the patients, Jeff,” Abed says calmly as he cracks open his soda. “You’re Dr. Cox, but you’re also all three of his patients. And your rabies is your high cholesterol.”

Jeff’s blood turns to ice at the very word. “Jesus, you _know_ about that? You weren’t even here this week! Who spilled?”

“Doesn’t matter. The point is that we need to eat this lunch together so I can pull you out of your guilt-spiral. Because your penchant for riveting speeches isn’t the only thing you have in common with Dr. Cox,” Abed says sagely, raising his eyebrows and nodding toward the well-stocked bar cart in the corner of the room. “The next episode gets pretty dark for you if this doesn’t work.”

Shit. “I liked it better when I was JD,” Jeff mutters, watching Abed unwrap his sandwich. It looks _good._ There’s some kind of melty cheese oozing over the sides, and it’s all assembled on the kind of crusty French baguette Jeff used to go wild for, before he stopped eating carbs. Or at least stopped eating them in public.

It’s too much to take in, and Jeff bristles rather than try to parse it out. “If you know I have high cholesterol, and you’re implying it’s going to kill me like the rabies killed those patients, why on God’s green earth would you bring me a lunch that looks like this?”

Abed pauses with a fry halfway to his mouth. “It’s not rabies because it’s going to kill you. It’s rabies because it’s not your fault. You’re beating yourself up over it like Dr. Cox, but he did everything he could for those patients and there was nothing he should’ve done differently. Sometimes bodies just don’t behave the way we want them to.” He looks Jeff square in the face when he speaks again. “You can’t beat yourself up for something that’s out of your control.”

He goes back to eating, his point made, and Jeff stares at him. He can feel his hands start to shake. “It’s not _out of my control,_ Abed,” he says loudly. “It’s my body – it’s the _one thing_ I should have total control over, and I can’t even do the _bare minimum_ of keeping myself alive. And after all the hard work I put in to be the pinnacle of health and wellness–”

“Cut the crap.”

Jeff blinks. “I’m sorry, _what?”_

Abed gazes at him steadily. “I said ‘Cut the crap,’ Jeff. You’re the pinnacle of aesthetic godliness, but you’re not the pinnacle of health and wellness. Just because you buy more expensive alcohol doesn’t mean you don’t drink like a college kid on a bender.” He lowers his gaze and adds, “Plus – you lived with me last year. Your sleep schedule is garbage. You don’t do ‘healthy’ unless you can see it on the outside.”

Jeff swallows, dropping his gaze to where his hands are gripping his knees like they’re his last anchor to this earth. He’d like to disappear. He thought he was doing such a good job of hiding in plain sight – all those salads, those hardboiled eggs, the endless trips to the gym. Leave it to Abed to cut him to the quick, as usual.

Finally, he shakes his head. “I can’t eat this crap, Abed.”

He feels the couch shift as Abed slides closer to him.

“It’s just food,” he says quietly. “It doesn’t have any intrinsic moral value. And I know I basically live on pasta, cereal, and fried cafeteria food, but trust me when I say that one meal with a friend isn’t going to kill you.”

“I’m telling you, I can’t.”

“Jeff…”

Abed’s full attention is on Jeff, and his eyes are so wide and gentle, and Jeff’s hands are shaking so bad he feels like he might just vibrate right out of his body. “If I start eating like that,” he whispers, “I will never stop.”

And that’s the truth. The sad, sick, pathetic truth is that Jeff’s such a fuckup, even his _eating disorder_ is all wrong, the kind that has him counting calories and weighing out lettuce leaves in the morning just to leave him crouched in the backseat of his car in the parking lot of a fast food joint at midnight, shoveling food into his mouth so fast he can barely taste it. It’s the reason he forces himself to run on the treadmill until his lungs are screaming for mercy, to do crunches and pull-ups and push-ups until his muscles are on fire.

Because Jeff would _love_ to have the kind of discipline to turn down food when no one’s looking and have all the numbers reflect that strong will. Instead, that one number – only _slightly_ elevated, just enough out of the normal range to warrant a red flag on his bloodwork – is his dirty secret personified. It’s proof that his high-and-mighty asceticism is a lie, that he’s hungry, that he _wants,_ and worse, he wants what he shouldn’t, and he’s utterly incapable of denying himself his guilty pleasures.

“I took Pierce and Troy out for ice cream this week,” he says, so quietly he can barely hear himself, “and later that night, I went back there and bought a pint and ate the whole thing in my car where no one could see me. If I stray from my plan just a little, if I am _one_ calorie off, I will dig myself into a hole that it takes days to get out of. And this bloodwork is proof that I am not in control of any aspect of my life, which makes me a failure.”

He watches his hands tremble in front of him. He refuses to look at Abed, even as he feels him slide closer on the couch and begin to speak.

“Did you ever think that maybe the reason you eat like that is because you’re hungry from starving yourself all day?” His voice is low next to Jeff’s ear, and Jeff shivers.

“You’re allowed to be hungry, Jeff. You’re allowed to want things.”

Jeff presses the heels of his hands to his eyes and exhales shakily. _I want_ you, _Abed,_ he thinks, and hates himself for it. But it’s getting harder to deny with every passing day. Jeff is a glutton – for food, for punishment, for painful and unrequited feelings that don’t make sense and make him feel like a monster. And Abed – Abed is _too good,_ for any of them, really, and doesn’t deserve the weight of someone like Jeff.

He picks his head up and turns to face Abed, whose own face is so close, close enough for Jeff to count his freckles, each individual eyelash. There’s something like concern in his eyes, and Jeff doesn’t deserve it.

“I don’t deserve the things I want,” he says gruffly, moving to throw his untouched sandwich back in the paper bag.

Abed stills him with a hand on his arm. “But you do, Jeff. You’re a good person, and you deserve good things.” He pulls his hand back, his fingers folding and twisting against themselves as he speaks again. “Also, I hate to be the ‘You need help’ guy, but I think this is way beyond my area of expertise. I don’t want to say the wrong thing here, and I don’t want to see you hit rock bottom.”

He glances at Jeff out of the corner of his eye before dropping his gaze once more. “The next episode after ‘My Lunch’ is called ‘My Fallen Idol.’ I don’t want to let this get that far.”

Jeff tries to ignore the way something twists in his chest at the thought of Abed calling him his idol. That’s not what’s happening here, and he knows it, but part of him wants to hope for it – and once the idea is there, he can’t deny himself.

Jeff tries to remember how things played out on the show. “So, Dr. Cox’s patients all die, and he shows up to work drunk and then goes on a scotch bender, is that what happens?”

Abed looks up, surprised, before nodding. “Exactly.”

“What would have happened if he got to have that lunch JD brought him?”

“It’s a TV show, Jeff. That’s not how it works.” Abed smiles slightly. “But he probably would’ve felt a lot better regardless. JD gets on his nerves, but Dr. Cox knows he needs JD just as much as JD needs him.”

“Probably much more,” Jeff says softly, the corner of his mouth quirking up into a smile. He looks at Abed for a long moment, and Abed lets him look, and looks right back.

Jeff tries to hate himself a little less for wanting. “So these fries – these aren’t from the Greendale cafeteria, are they? Or your dorm?”

“Nope,” Abed says, his smile widening. “I went to the good sandwich place down the street. I splurged for you, Winger.”

Jeff can’t help the way his smiles grows at that. “Well, in that case,” he says, “it would be rude to turn them down, wouldn’t it?”

Jeff knows the guilt will swallow him whole when Abed leaves, the shame driving him headfirst into a bottle of Macallan and leaving him to binge on whatever food he can find. 

What a miracle, then, when Abed turns on the TV and stays.

**Author's Note:**

> Yikes @ me attempting to write for a new pairing but if you made it this far thanks for reading! I'm on tumblr @ slutabed usually shipping Trobed and occasionally yearning for Jabed from the shadows.


End file.
